Pulse
Public Health’s Head Cheerleader
As dean of the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health, John Finnegan has helped make the school one of the best in the country, and he’s been its biggest booster along the way.
John Finnegan Jr., Ph.D., is holding court over coffee. Seated at the center of a conference table on the 11th floor of the University of Minnesota’s Mayo building and flanked by about 25 faculty, staff members, and students from the School of Public Health’s Environmental Sciences Division, he talks about budget and governance—two subjects that might seem arcane to some but affect every member of this group. What is going to happen to the school in light of the university’s $132.2 million budget shortfall? And what will be the effect of the impending change of leadership at the Academic Health Center, the umbrella organization under which the school sits?
All eyes are on Dean Finnegan during this informal meeting—something he often holds with staff and students from the school’s four divisions to keep up with their concerns. When asked about the budget situation, he keeps the tone upbeat, explaining that he doesn’t want to see destroyed what they have worked so hard to create: a school that has the third-largest student body of all public health schools in the United States and a top-10 designation in the U.S. News and World Report ranking of public health schools. “And we’re still the best deal,” he says of the fact that the school has the fourth-lowest tuition cost among the top-10-ranked schools.
Whether speaking to members of his team or those on the outside, the gregarious Finnegan is an unabashed cheerleader for the School of Public Health. “Anything to promote my school,” he says wryly before sitting down to an interview. And promote the school he does. During the last week of April, he spoke at the veterinary school commencement about the joint DVM/MPH program—the largest one in the country, served on a panel at a summit on women and heart disease, and helped host a delegation from Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet.
Talking to Finnegan, it’s clear that he’s passionate about more than just the school. He wants to elevate public health itself. That’s why he’ll provide the opening remarks at the school’s annual public health film festival, serve on a health care reform panel with Sen. Al Franken, greet former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, M.D., at a fundraiser for the university’s program in human sexuality, hold a recognition ceremony for public health leaders in the community who mentor students or serve as guest lecturers or research partners, or, fitting with his open-door policy, sit down any time with faculty or students to discuss their ideas for new projects or career options. “If there’s a hallmark of my role here as dean, it is to, in a much more systematic fashion, raise the visibility of public health—not just my school, but public health.”
For Finnegan, doing so means viewing health through a wide-angle lens—looking at ways public policy, agriculture, business, education, transportation, and the health sciences can work together. For that reason, the School of Public Health has increasingly extended its research hand to others within the university. “I don’t think there’s a college or school that we haven’t collaborated with in some way, shape, or form,” he says, adding that the fact that the school’s faculty and staff are in 10 different buildings scattered across campus makes it likely that “everybody on campus knows somebody in public health.” School officials have also reached out to community clinics in the Twin Cities, the Minnesota Department of Health and local public health departments, even institutions outside the United States. “Interdisciplinary, interprofessional, collaborative research partnerships; to me, that’s what public health is,” Finnegan explains.
Accidental Career
In many ways, Finnegan is living his own definition. Unlike other deans of public health schools in the United States, Finnegan has no formal training in the discipline. The son of a St. Paul newspaper editor, he studied English at the University of St. Thomas, earned a master’s degree in journalism and mass communication at the University of Minnesota, and had a brief career as a reporter.
While pursuing his doctorate at the university in the early 1980s (his dissertation was on the development of defamation law in the 19th century), Finnegan was approached by F. Gerald Kline, Ph.D., then director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, about getting involved in a research project aimed at preventing heart disease. Kline, who was co-investigator with Henry Blackburn, M.D., head of epidemiology in the School of Public Health, needed someone with professional media experience to help craft messages. “When Jerry came to me and laid out this huge project, one of three big community trials funded by the NIH, I thought about it for two minutes and jumped on it,” Finnegan says. “In those days, there were not many people who were doing health and communications or looking at media applications and public health promotion and prevention.”
In fact, public health communication back then was in Finnegan’s words “very medical, very nonaudience-focused.” He recalls frustrating discussions with a nutritionist about how people needed to know which foods were good and bad for them rather than—he rolls his eyes and grimaces when he says this—“the molecular difference between monosaturated, polyunsaturated, and saturated fats.” “When you translate [scientific] information for the public, they don’t need to know everything you know in order to improve their lives,” he explains.
Finnegan’s work with the Minnesota Heart Health Program led to other campaigns to prevent adolescent alcohol use, tobacco use, and cancer as well as one to teach people how to recognize the signs of a heart attack in order to encourage them to get to the hospital sooner. His skills as a communicator won him and a media group he assembled a number of awards including a 1998 Aurora for a documentary on heart attack survivors. (He now jokes about mounting the gold-winged trophy he keeps in his office to the hood of his car.) “What we were doing back in the ’80s set a new professional standard for communication in public health campaigns,” he says.
That work led to a faculty appointment in the division of epidemiology in 1985. In 1998, Finnegan was named associate dean for academic affairs. “One thing leads to another, and they keep finding new jobs for you,” he says with a grin. In 2005, a year after the departure of Mark Becker, Ph.D., who served as dean for less than four years, he was chosen from a field of 60 candidates to become the seventh leader in the school’s history. “The school was on the right trajectory,” says Frank Cerra, M.D., who heads the Academic Health Center, of the work Becker had done. “But it needed John’s leadership and personal skills to continue to move it forward.”
Finnegan came into the job with a very specific agenda: to grow the school and the faculty and to invest in new areas of research. At the time, the school had 92 faculty members, 350 students, and a reputation as a research institute. Education was considered a sideline. “When I took this job, one of the phrases I used to use is, ‘We are not going to become the Rodney Dangerfield school of public health that gets no respect,’” Finnegan says.
In order to figure out how to increase the size of the school—and raise its national eminence—Finnegan turned to his faculty, asked them which areas they felt should be emphasized, then went to bat to get the resources his team needed. “He was open to allowing us not only to do as division heads what we think are the right things to do but to create real support around what we see as the vision for the school,” says Bernard Harlow, Ph.D., head of the school’s epidemiology and community health division whom Finnegan hired away from Harvard in 2005.
Those meetings led to investments in obesity research, heart disease prevention, public health genomics, social epidemiology (the study of factors associated with good and bad health such as poverty and health disparities), information management (the school is home to the Research Data Assistance Center, which provides Medicare and Medicaid data for research studies, and the State Health Access Data Assistance Center, which helps states monitor insurance coverage), and prevention of HIV/AIDS. “That’s not easy to do in a conservative political environment,” he says of HIV/AIDS research.
They also prompted Finnegan to reach out to the professional public health community in a more formal way. This year, he brought together the executive teams from the school and from the Minnesota Department of Health to talk about collaborating on research and translating the work being done at the university into programs that improve people’s lives. He hopes to have such meetings every year.
Staff and students are now involved in projects at community clinics in St. Paul and North Minneapolis aimed at reducing health disparities among Latinos and African Americans, helping the residents of Albert Lea live longer, and assisting federal health officials in solving conundrums such as a salmonella outbreak that was traced to jalapeno peppers. The school also has established relationships with institutions in Africa, Asia, and South and Central America. “We’re not into Antarctica yet,” Finnegan says with a chuckle.
Swimming Upstream
Through these efforts, Finnegan has accomplished his goal of growing the school. Today, it boasts 135 faculty members with several more to be added by the end of 2010, has the sixth-highest NIH funding ranking among schools of public health, and has a total enrollment of 1,500 students. “We’ve grown and become very successful even during a very difficult economic period,” says Harlow, who has been able to hire 10 new faculty members in the last five years in order to strengthen the division’s infectious diseases, reproductive health, and women’s health programs. “By virtue of [Dean Finnegan’s] support, it allowed me to make the types of changes that have created a great place for us to be doing teaching and research.”
Finnegan’s challenge will be to maintain such momentum—a tall order given the university’s current financial quandary. “The state’s support of the university is expected to drop from $700 million a year to about $400 million a year by 2012-13. “That’s a 43 percent drop—that’s enormous,” Finnegan says. He predicts those cuts will hurt more than just his programs. “One way to look at it is that for every dollar the state invests in my school, I bring back $10 in extramural grant funding. And that’s jobs, to look at it rather crassly.”
Yet even as he considers how his school can survive such cuts, he maintains his upbeat tone—and his collegial approach. “I never look at these as zero-sum gains, where if medicine gains, we lose or if pharmacy gains, we must lose. You have to get away from strategies of scarcity and focus on strategies of abundance,” he says, keeping the big picture in focus. “And the only way you can get strategies of abundance is if medicine, public health, and all of the health sciences leverage one another. It can’t be about our little empires and our fiefdoms. It’s gotta be about improving human health.”—Kim Kiser